Delete your code

A presentation at NERDSummit 2023 in in Amherst, MA, USA by Michael Miles

An active codebase is ever changing. Code is added, updated, optimized and sometimes deleted. That last action, deleting code, can be an intimidating one for developers. Deleting code feels permanent, absolute and hard to undo. It’s simpler to comment out the code instead, so that, if needed, it can be quickly recovered. However doing this, can cause many headaches for developers, teams and projects. Deleting code does not have to be scary, especially when using a code repository such as git. This talk will explain the benefits of deleting old code from a codebase, how to feel confident doing so and how to best utilize a git repository to keep track of and (if needed) restore deleted code.

Resources

The following resources were mentioned during the presentation or are useful additional information.